Burn
by Miss Nihilist
Summary: Even if Zak hadn't been able to hear what happened, he had been close enough to get a good look while Argost sucked out Zak Monday's soul. He had experienced the Flute of Gilgamesh himself, first-hand. It wasn't pleasant. In one word, it was pain; the very definition of the word. Zak Monday looked as though he was fine with that.


**A/N: A quick oneshot born of my dissatisfaction. I mean, Van Rook got a funeral, and he wasn't exactly a nice guy.**

 **(I've never written for this fandom before, but I gave it my best shot.)**

* * *

"Dad!" Argost's ship was disappearing on the horizon, but instead of immediately hurrying to gather his allies, Zak Saturday grabbed his dad by the hand and tugged him in the other direction. "Dad, I think something's wrong. Argost doesn't have my powers, but he had the Smoke Mirror, and Zak Monday— the flute music, it— a-and those centipede cryptids—"

It was obvious that his dad was confused, but Doc put a hand on his son's shoulder and tried to smile. "It's okay, Zak," he said. The familiar weight coaxed the boy into relaxing. "Whatever happened, I'm sure that we can handle it. Slow down. What's this about the Smoke Mirror?"

Zak shook his head. "Argost stole it. He— he knew about the Mondays. Somehow." He bit back the feeling of guilt in his chest. Lying wasn't going to fix the rift between him and his parents, but they had plenty of time when all of this was over to sort through it all. A little white lie to keep his dad focused wasn't the end of the world. "I guess that he liked the idea of an anti-Kur more than stealing _my_ powers. I— well, I'm not really sure what he did, but Zak hasn't woken up yet." He pointed to the crumpled form of his doppelgänger, a shock of white and black against the blue-tinted rocks of the tiny island.

Though his distaste was clear, Doc nodded. He didn't have to like the twisted version of his son to know that leaving him here, alone and injured, was a cruel thing to do. "I'll see what I can do," he promised. "Taking care of a human isn't the same as a cryptid."

He walked over to the fallen duplicate while Zak maintained his distance. Getting too close would risk the fabric of reality tearing. But, now that Zak was thinking about it, hadn't he already been close? They had been near each other when Argost… when he had sucked out the power of an alternate Kur. And Zak must have gotten close to him at some point while he was holding off Munya and Argost, but though his memory was a blur of adrenaline, he couldn't remember any reality-altering elements to the fight.

His dad hadn't moved. Doc was crouched down next to Zak Monday, his hand outstretched as if to touch the boy, but he wasn't. From this position, Zak couldn't see his dad's face. He cleared his throat anyway. "Dad?" He tried. Was something wrong?

The sound of his son's voice inspired a change. Doc lifted his head, turning to look over his shoulder at them. It must have been quite the sight. Fisk was still matted with dirt from chasing the Revolving Beast, Komodo had a thick bandage around his sprained leg, and Zak was covered in light scratches; purpling bruises visible through his torn clothes. Tsul Kalu was nowhere to be seen, but Zak could still feel him. Near. Watching. Perhaps he was wondering why the "anti-Kur" had yet to open his eyes or even stir.

Personally, Zak was more interested in the haunted look in his dad's eyes.

"... Go to the airship, boys," he said carefully. "Call your mom. Fill her in on what happened. I'll be there soon."

That wasn't what Zak was expecting to hear. He shared a look with Fisk, but the gorilla-cat merely blinked, obviously just as confused as he was. Drew was in the Himalayas — they all knew that they wouldn't be able to get a hold of her with service that spotty.

Something didn't feel right. Tentatively, Zak took a step forward. "Dad, is something—?"

"Zak!" Doc snapped, cutting him off. His next words were quieter, but the edge in his eyes didn't soften. "Just listen to me for once. In the airship. Now."

Their relationship was usually so easy that Zak sometimes forgot that his parents had authority. Sometimes, they were more like best friends than parent and child. He hesitated, but the look on Doc's face said that he was serious this time. Fisk had already shrunk back. Now wasn't the time to be stubborn.

"Sure, dad." His voice sounded wrong. Everything felt disconnected. "I'll try to get mom on the videophone." When he didn't try to move, Fisk gingerly placed his hands on Zak's shoulders and hefted him up.

Riding on Fisk's shoulders had a familiar ease to it, but Zak barely noticed. His thoughts were scattered. He knew that he should be making a list of allies, getting in contact with people, drilling his Kur powers harder than ever, and yet… He couldn't. Something was niggling at the back of his mind — something that he knew should be obvious, but it wouldn't come to him.

His head was throbbing, his entire body was sore and stiff, and Zak felt as though he literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Why, then, had it felt like he'd left his stomach back with Zak Monday?

* * *

His mom explained everything to him later.

She was distracted by the same thing that had Doyle locked in his room on the airship. Zak had wanted to ask about it, but mom and dad both seemed intent on keeping different truths from him.

For once, Drew wasn't wearing her gloves. That was what told Zak that something was wrong. Her jumpsuit was still on, but she had unzipped it at the top and switched out her combat boots for something more comfortable. There was supposed to be a war on the horizon. He wanted to remind her of that. Argost was out there, preparing to attack the entire globe, and she didn't even have her fire sword at hand.

Even though a near-constant headache thrummed at the back of his mind, Zak knew that being smart with his mom was a bad idea. She looked tired. Doyle would sometimes throw things from the seclusion of his room — things that made crashes loud enough to wake Zak up late at night as he spat words that the thirteen-year-old was certain he wasn't supposed to hear. Somehow, Zak knew that his mom and uncle weren't tense because of the upcoming war.

"Zak, sweetie…" his mom sighed. The explanation that she must have spent hours sorting in her head seemed to wilt under his blank stare. She pulled him against her, running her fingers through the shock of white hair at the front of his scalp. The silence between them was so heavy that the air seemed to shudder when she finally broke it. "You know what effect the Flute of Gilgamesh has when it's used on Kur, don't you?"

She didn't pull away, so Zak compromised and twisted around to glance up at the underside of her chin. "Yeah. It… "banishes the Spirit of Kur," doesn't it?" He could remember it vividly. The pain had been unforgettable — it had wrenched him from his body, and at the same time, all he had been able to focus on was the white-hot fire searing every nerve.

His mom hummed, resting a hand on his chest, just over his heart. "And what happens to a body that doesn't have a spirit? If someone doesn't have a soul?"

Doc wouldn't have approved of her phrasing, but Zak answered automatically. "A person can't live without a soul," he replied. The mesh of spirituality and science would have been confusing for most people, but he had been raised this way. The soul was the incorporeal essence of a living being. Soul was the mental abilities of a living being; reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, and much, much more.

She was silent, letting her implication sink in slowly. Looking back, it was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when he finally understood.

Zak wasn't sure why he hadn't pieced it together sooner. He suddenly became enamored with his shoes. "Oh." It seemed obvious now. The Flute of Gilgamesh was a way to banish Kur from this realm. Of course, that meant death. It had just never really clicked — that a weapon from another reality could harm Zak Monday, or that it could be so… permanent. Or maybe Zak simply hadn't wanted to think about it.

He could feel how Drew's jaw twitched as a grimace undoubtedly came to her face. "Yeah," she mumbled. "I'm sorry, kiddo. There wasn't anything we could do. Once the heart stops…" She didn't finish, but she didn't need to.

Slowly, Zak found his voice. "Can I see him?"

He wasn't expecting his mom to say yes. Frankly, he wasn't sure if he should be grateful or not that she eventually nodded.

* * *

Seeing Zak Monday's body was just as weird as Zak thought it would be.

It helped not to think about it directly. Doc would say that his body was well-past algor mortis. It had only been a day; he was probably cold to the touch now. He would be crawling with maggots if they had left him on the island instead of tucked neatly into a sterilized pod. The mental image of his doppelgänger being eaten by his own stomach acids and the insects from the earth around him was enough to make Zak grimace. It wasn't enough to have him look away.

If he had asked his mom, she might have commented on how… serene Zak Monday looked. It bothered Zak. Even if he hadn't been able to hear what the screams of his double, he had been close enough to get a good look while Argost sucked out Zak Monday's soul. Zak had experienced the Flute of Gilgamesh himself, first-hand.

It wasn't pleasant. It was awful, stinging, blinding, terrible, aching, biting, searing, and all-consuming. It had been arduous, piercing, vexatious, tormenting, anguishing, obliterating, harrowing, excruciating, agonizing, debilitating, and _burning_.

In one word, it was _pain_ ; the very definition of the word.

Zak Monday looked as though he was fine with that.

No one said anything. Seeing the body for the first time, Doc and Drew had both decided the accompany their son. He wondered what his parents were thinking. He doubted that they were happy, even if the Mondays weren't exactly their friends. Zak had never seen anyone dead before. Sure, there were a few pets over the years, a handful of cryptids that they simply hadn't been able to help… But it hadn't been like this. It hadn't been nearly so severe as it was now.

Maybe the silence was rooted in the way that the pale, stiff corpse looked nearly identical to the boy breathing just a few feet from it.

Eventually, Zak turned to his parents. "We should bury him," he said. It would have been nice to return Zak Monday to his parallel word, but the Smoke Mirror was smashed to dust this time. Doc had been working on trying to piece it back together, but there was no way to squeeze those little fragments into a working mirror anyway.

He wondered if the Monday versions of his parents missed their son. Had they noticed that he was gone? Would they even care enough to bury the body, if the Saturdays had somehow managed to send it back?

Zak wasn't sure, and somehow, that was sadder than the 13-year-old body peacefully undisturbed behind him.

His parents shared a meaningful look and Drew nodded. "Of course, sweetie." She knelt down, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Where would you—? I mean, where do you think—?" She bit her lip, cutting herself off before she could worsen the thick tension in the room any further.

The real question went unasked, but Zak answered it anyway. "Our house," he replied almost immediately. "In the forest. Somewhere peaceful, where I— where _he_ can be alone."

* * *

The next day, there was a small ceremony. No one knew what to say, but it felt wrong to bury a child without any comment. Zak didn't have one pleasant memory of his doppelgänger. Nothing cruel that Zak Monday did had even an ounce of regret or hesitation. He had tried to kill the Saturdays more than once, gleefully tormented cryptids simply because he could, and always seemed to have something mocking or insulting to spit out. The only reason he had died was because he had been more focused on making Zak suffer, rather than heading his warning and running when he had the opportunity.

No. That wasn't right. Zak Monday had died because Argost was a despicable being — not through any fault of his own. He was being buried only because a madman wanted power. Because of an accident that happened before he was even born.

Zak watched his parents try to say something — anything — in the face of their son lying in a cold coffin. Doyle didn't make an attempt. He kept a hand on Zak's shoulder, and when Doc and Drew finally petered off their mumblings, he was the one to heft the coffin lid into place and help Fisk lower it into the shallow grave they'd dug.

He stayed quiet, and when the grave had been filled and the crude headstone was fixed in the ground, Zak lingered as everyone else started back towards the airship. He had a war to stop. There were more important things than the death of someone who would have gladly danced on Zak's own grave, but his legs didn't seem to want to move.

The voices of hundreds of cryptids thrummed in the back of his mind. The headache from the last week or so was building, and even though Zak would never admit it, he hated it. He wanted to lay down and sleep for days. He wanted his mom to make hot cocoa with mini-marshmallows again, he wanted his dad to laugh with Dr. Beeman and Dr. Cheechoo again, and he wanted to go back to when all this Kur mess started and _stay out of it_.

Flowers seemed wrong. The clean, pure white petals didn't fit the picture. Almost deliriously, Zak had the urge to set them on fire. He got the feeling that his double would have enjoyed something like that.

Instead, he sighed. He gathered up the chamise and the morning glory and the Catalina lilies that were left on Zak Monday's grave. He tossed them away, into the foliage of the surrounding forest. "Sorry," Zak muttered. "I know this must suck. You probably wanted a funeral with burning skulls."

The silence was thick; suffocating. Zak knew that there ought to be birds and squirrels and leaves rustling in the wind, but there was no sound save his slow breathing. It felt… right. It paired well with the weight on his shoulders and the body beneath his feet. He didn't know why he was wasting time; trying to comfort himself over someone as twisted as Zak Monday.

If it wasn't for his double, it very easily could have been Zak himself in that grave.

It wasn't fair, but what did that matter? When had injustice ever turned back time? They were both very different people — Saturday and Monday — but they had this one thing in common, at least. They had both grown too much, too fast. A power that neither of them had asked for, a legacy too ancient for either of them to comprehend, had brought them both to this grave. Kur's power was _fire_ in the most animalistic sense, and they had both been too wrapped in the flames to realize that they were being burned.

Finally, as the sun began to dip below the treetops, Zak turned and walked away. The voices of thousands of cryptids, tucked in the darkest parts of his mind, were solemn and understanding. Maybe they sensed that Kur wasn't in the mood; for the rest of the day, they were silent.

It was as though, for at least a moment, the entire world mourned.

But a moment was all that Zak could afford — he still had a war to stop.


End file.
